


too bad that she has no sympathy

by suitablyskippy



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Inappropriate Thoughts About Chakra, Ruthless Prison Management, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 15:02:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3254081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitablyskippy/pseuds/suitablyskippy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“So Orochimaru sent you here to talk to <i>me</i>,” Karin concludes. She nudges up her glasses, satisfied. “Because I run the best prison in all of Sound.”</p><p>Sasuke says nothing. He doesn’t need to: she <i>does</i> run the best one. Everyone in Sound knows it. Of the many vivid and fascinating subjects in which Karin has daydreamed she might one day educate Sasuke, ‘prison management’ was never a topic she thought to include; but everyone has to start somewhere, and Karin’s more than willing to take what she can get.</p><p>(No one goes to the southern base if they can help it.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	too bad that she has no sympathy

**Author's Note:**

> Set somewhere in the middle of the timeskip.

The morning klaxon is wailing. In every direction there’s chakra stirring, inmates scrambling into wakefulness. Sunrise has broken across the island’s ragged cliffs and Sasuke must have travelled through the night, to be so close by now: Karin judges his chakra barely fifty miles off, and activates her sensor’s jutsu unnecessarily to amplify the signal – to let his chakra hum through her, all around her, flood her senses with his presence – intense and intoxicating, _immediate_... 

It’s the kind of thing that could overwhelm a woman, if she let it; it’s the kind of thing that could overwhelm a woman, if she didn’t have a prison to run, and Karin kicks the door to the staff quarters shut behind her and heads out for morning inspection. 

There’s usually at least a little job satisfaction to be wrung from the variously crestfallen expressions the inmates get at the sight of her, but her mind is elsewhere today, with a travelling party that’s some forty miles out across the ocean and getting nearer by the moment, and her heart just isn’t in it. Whatever misguided sparks of hope the inmates might have kindled overnight still snuff out instantly at the confirmation of her continued existence – of her continued surveillance, her continued lack of mercy – but she’s only going through the motions: pacing the long, empty halls as Sasuke’s chakra keeps on getting closer. 

His party is in sight within the hour. Karin watches their approach from above the north gate, shading her eyes from the bright glare of sunlight on the ocean. The only appealing part of the procession is Sasuke, though that’s hardly a surprise; behind him are eight new inmates, shackled in a line, trudging up from the rocky shore through the shade of a high stone bluff. At the back is whichever irrelevant Sound-nin has been assigned to accompany Sasuke, but the irrelevant Sound-nin has chakra reserves so pathetically stagnant he’s probably been wearing the lilac of Sound for years without ever getting noticed by Orochimaru, and Karin’s not remotely interested. 

The procession approaches the gate. The dull, heavy sound of clanking manacles grows louder. 

Sasuke stops once they’re in earshot, shielding his red stare to squint up at where she stands above the gate. His hair is stiff with sea salt; his very nearly bare chest is still damp with sea spray; he says, “Karin.”

His voice is low and husky from disuse or dehydration or possibly puberty. Karin spares him the briefest of nods. “Been a while.”

It’s been seven months and a week and two days, in fact, which as warden is a completely normal piece of information for her to know by heart, seeing as how she keeps a log of all visitors to the prison and in the last seven months, one week, and two days, she’s had just one: and it was Sasuke. He arrived at sundown, delivered two scrolls filled with medical supplies, stayed the night in the staff quarters, and borrowed a towel for his morning shower that Karin hasn’t washed since. A highlight of her year, though seeing how the rest of her year has mostly consisted of overseeing slop-bucket disposal, that’s hardly saying much. 

The new arrivals mill about, chains clanking, bare feet scuffing on the stone, trying to look inconspicuous and failing miserably. The irrelevant Sound-nin loiters just off to the side. The prison gate stands open, arcs scored in the dust where she shoved it open earlier, but Sasuke hasn’t moved from where he’s stopped outside it. 

Karin’s patience hits its limit within seconds. “What the hell are you waiting for? This is _prison_ , you’re not getting a tour of the place. Get inside.” 

The new arrivals jolt into hasty, shambling action. Each of them is bedraggled from the journey, dirty from however long they’ve spent in holding at the central base’s prison; each of their chakra systems has been dulled by a process so routine that Kabuto keeps a neat little block-cut ink stamp for it: a single efficient moment for the suppression seal to burn itself into flesh, and done. One by one they trail in, and one by one Karin commits their dulled signals to memory. They’ll be getting duller by the day, now they’re here. Misery, despair, whatever – it saturates the thrum of chakra through the prison with a gloomy, soul-deep greyness. It’s Hidden Sound: _everyone’s_ got it rough. 

 

+++

 

There’s space in the east wing. Karin drags the gates closed and follows them inside, and though there _are_ no guided tours in prison she leads them the long way round anyway. Plaintive, eerie wailing echoes through the endless stone halls, the inhuman howls of an inmate population she didn’t bother feeding yesterday, just to be completely sure the noise levels would be intolerable for the new arrivals. The sooner they get used to it, the easier it’ll be for them; the sooner their spirits break, the easier it’ll be for her. 

A particularly raucous bellow sets the whole place ringing. When the echoes clear, Sasuke says, “Is this a men’s prison.”

His voice is flat. His voice is generally flat, and the look Karin gives him is only startled for a moment, before it turns considering. 

“Why are you actually here?” 

A brief, enigmatic silence. “I was told to deliver the prisoners.”

“ _Anyone_ could deliver prisoners.”

The enigmatic silence returns, lingering. Half-mad screams reverberate through the halls. 

“So Orochimaru sent you here for _me_ ,” Karin concludes. She nudges up her glasses, satisfied. “Because I run the best prison in all of Sound.”

Sasuke says nothing. He doesn’t need to: she _does_ run the best one. Everyone in Sound knows it. And everyone in Sound knows that Orochimaru’s training his next vessel up to peak performance, too: if Sasuke’s here to learn, that means Karin has been hand-selected as the best possible teacher. 

Of the many vivid and fascinating subjects in which Karin has daydreamed she might one day educate Sasuke, ‘prison management’ was never a topic she thought to include. But everyone has to start somewhere; she’ll take what she can get, and she keeps talking while she unlocks the thick-barred gates of the east wing, brisk and professional. 

“It’s not a men’s prison, but if a woman’s still fertile, she’s generally kept at the labs. And most kunoichi are dead before they get beyond childbearing age, so that’s most of them. Us. Whatever.” She glances round. Sasuke’s eyes are lit red, too bright in the gloom; he’s pacing at her side, frowning severely at the cells they’re passing, the prisoners inside them, the turnings they pass without taking. 

He’s paying attention.

She unlocks the door to the new arrivals’ new home, and waves them in with a feeling of vindicated success lodged hard and high in her chest like a small polished stone. There’s a frenzied, last-minute protest from the new arrivals, but it’s cursory, and it’s also rapidly curtailed by the irrelevant Sound-nin suddenly activating a clan jutsu that unhinges his jaw by at least a foot, bulks out the muscles to control it, and fills it with razored sabre-teeth that drip some viscous liquid. He growls a string of threatening, gurgling vowels, and the new arrivals bolt inside the cell before half of them even have their shackles removed. 

“I don’t know who you think you’re impressing,” Karin tells him, her tone disdainful, and she locks the prison cell with a key she doubts she’ll ever use again. 

 

+++

 

If Sasuke wasn’t here, she’d spend the next few hours on paperwork; the monthly audits are due soon, and it always takes a day or so for Orochimaru’s chosen messenger-snake to transport them back to the central base. But Sasuke _is_ here, and less importantly so is the irrelevant Sound-nin, and so Karin leads them deeper into the base, to the staff quarters, and through the halls to the staff kitchen, which is a small, yellow-painted room with two sticky countertops and an electric stovetop, a kettle, a microwave. “Tea, coffee, whatever. You want something?”

“Coffee would be great, thank you,” says the irrelevant Sound-nin, who’s taken a place at the table, rubbing painfully at his rehinged jaw. 

Karin gives him the kind of look she usually reserves for inmates caught brown-handed smearing shit on their walls. “You can get up and make it, then, can’t you? You want something, Sasuke?”

“No,” says Sasuke, after a moment’s consideration. 

She makes him coffee anyway. He looks exhausted – his chakra _feels_ exhausted – and the fact he pulls the mug towards him when she sets it down only proves that Karin knows best what’s good for him. Sometimes _no_ is just _convince me_ , with coffee as with life as with love. As the sole parental figure for a young woman entering full bloom, she can admit that Orochimaru had his faults; as a role model for always going after what he wanted, though, he’s been inspirational. 

The irrelevant Sound-nin surfaces from an investigation of the further depths of the kitchen cupboards. “Is there any sugar?” 

Karin casts him a contemptuous glance. “Store cupboard’s down the hall,” she says, and turns back to Sasuke. “You wanna talk, or what? I’m not having Orochimaru say I didn’t do my job just cos you wouldn’t suck it up and ask me shit. What do you need to know?”

Sasuke contemplates the murky surface of his coffee. “I’ll learn what I need to by watching,” he says, eventually. 

The chakra signal of the other Sound-nin is receding; his footsteps are hurrying away down the hall, growing quieter.

Karin says, “Watching?” 

“Mm.” Fine dark hair has spilled across his eyes, over the dulled Sound hitai-ate he hadn’t been wearing the last time he visited her jail. She’s paused at the kitchen counter, one hand flat on its tacky surface; he glances up at her. “Show me around the jail. That’ll be enough.” 

If he’s gonna act like he’s got the right to order her around, he could at least do it with a little fucking _respect_ – but Karin supposes she can let it slide, just this once. She pushes away from the counter. The chakra rolling through him is bright and fierce as fire, hot and churning. Hers is the only chakra in the prison that hasn’t been suppressed; after months of sensing only weak and dusty nothing, the way his energy surges through him feels – almost _obscene_ – feels wild, dizzying... 

She drops down into the chair beside his. Sasuke’s elbow nudges hers when he lifts his mug. Karin scoots her chair a little nearer. Sasuke’s elbow jams unexpectedly into her side when he sets his mug back down, and he almost slops his coffee. 

He pushes the mug away. He looks at her. Karin props her chin in her hand, all the better to gaze up into his eyes and appreciate the white-hot pulse of the chakra focused behind them. 

“You’re very close,” says Sasuke, which Karin chooses to take as unmistakable confirmation that she’s not the only person at this table currently preoccupied by thoughts of their bodies’ tempting proximity. His voice had been neutral, but that means nothing: Karin of all people knows what it’s like to be forced to conceal the raging fires of passion beneath a cold, hardened carapace of professionalism. 

She cuts straight to the point. “So – you’ve been watching _me_ , Sasuke?”

An eternity of silence stretches out between them. It’s possible he’s speechless with desire; if so, Karin understands completely. The relentless surge of his chakra is only the distance of skin’s thickness away from her, and nothing else in the world has _ever_ felt as giddy as that much power, that heated, and that _close_ – nothing except for the side-effects of various experimental drug trials Kabuto volunteered her for, anyway, back in her days at the central base. 

The hiss of the kettle is almost offensively banal. Sasuke had been about to answer, but instead he glances to the counter, the rising plume of steam. The irrelevant Sound-nin is clearly too self-absorbed to notice the unspoken tension humming through the room – barging back in just to clatter his way through the cupboards, rummaging for a teaspoon... If he had any respect, he’d get the hell back out and leave them alone together; but he doesn’t, and the moment’s ruined. 

“Fine,” says Karin. “ _Fine_.” Abruptly she removes her glasses and starts a vigorous polish with the edge of her uniform jacket. “Are you staying? You’ve got a bed here if you need one.” The polishing pauses, for a moment – her gaze pins Sasuke’s once again – pins the unfocused red blurs where his eyes must be, anyway, and her voice drops to a lowered, meaningful pitch. “You’ll _always_ have a bed with me if you need one,” she says, and holds the gaze a moment longer before resuming polishing. 

The dark blur at her side shifts forward. “Orochimaru wants me back by sunrise.” 

Her mood takes an instant turn for the worse. She slips her glasses back on. The dark blur resolves itself into Sasuke, elbows propped on the table, fingers laced before his mouth. “Yeah, well, is that what I asked? Are you sleeping here or not?”

Sasuke shrugs. The shrug slips his wide-open shirt a little closer to falling off his shoulder. “No.” 

“Fine,” says Karin. “Fine, whatever.” Once her mood starts worsening it rarely stops, but she still can’t find it in herself to begrudge the very bare wedge of skin revealed by that wide-open shirt. “Do whatever the hell you want, I don’t care. You’d only get in the way if you stayed, anyway – I’ve got better things to do than listen to you whine about the cold.” Better things like running a jail, mainly, but also better things like adjusting that invitingly gaping collar for him, maybe – like letting her fingertips linger on his very bare chest once she’s done, maybe... 

Sasuke has the reflexes of a ninja who’s been apprenticed to Orochimaru for over a year, and the twitchy, hair-trigger paranoia to match it: he knocks her hand away before she’s even seen him moving, tomoe in his eyes suddenly whirling, red and wide. 

“What the _hell_ —!” Karin skids her chair backwards. His block wasn’t hard, but she rubs her wrist anyway, scowling. “I was trying to fix your shirt, asshole! You better fix it yourself, if you won’t let me. You look like a mess.” 

Sasuke blinks at her, which is about as close as Sasuke ever gets to expressing uncertainty. After a moment the frantic cycling of his eyes begins to slow; and then he shakes his head, minutely, as though clearing it of whatever paranoid bullshit Orochimaru’s been filling it with. He pulls his collar into place. “It was a gift from Orochimaru,” he says. His voice is getting steadier, flattening back into monotony. “The shirt is his design. For the –”

“Curse seal transformation, yeah, I _know_. I’m not a moron.” It was probably Sasuke’s version of an apology – he rarely volunteers information of his own accord – but like hell is Karin gonna let it mollify her, not when he’ll be gone before the daylight is and she’ll be left alone with a prison full of shrieking lunatics for company. “Hurry up then, or you can take your own damn self round the jail. I’m a busy woman, I haven’t got all day to waste on you.”

Sasuke says nothing, but he drains his mug and stands. Her own chakra is humming in agitation beneath the thin skin of her wrist; she can still feel the warm stamp of his fingers. Perhaps she could set one of the more unstable inmates loose, somehow – get Sasuke injured, just enough that he’d accept if she offered to heal him – just enough to guarantee his mouth against her skin, wet and hot, his tongue lapping at her chakra...

Except it would be unprofessional beyond belief to deliberately free an inmate, not to mention incredibly impractical; and Karin shoves the evolving fantasy from her mind and huffs in disgust, getting to her feet. 

Loitering uncomfortably against the wall, doing his useless best to fade into the background of slick countertops and cramped kitchen cupboards, the irrelevant Sound-nin clears his throat. “Uchiha-san? Should I come with—” 

“Are you Lord Orochimaru’s personal apprentice?” demands Karin. 

“Uh—”

“No,” she says, loud enough to override him, “no, you’re not, and no, you can’t. _I’m_ in charge. Stay here and don’t break anything – or,” she adds, voice hardening, “I’ll report you to Kabuto.”

Her hunch pays off: the irrelevant Sound-nin visibly blanches, and moves back against the counter with his mug of coffee held tight before him as though to ward off the bespectacled spectre of Kabuto. A clan jutsu as weird as the mouthful of tusks this guy was showing off earlier, there was never a chance Kabuto wouldn’t have had him on the operating table before now. Karin knows _exactly_ the kind of Sound-nin he is: part-time lackey and part-time test subject, unexceptional chakra, useless bloodline, dull and unremarkable and trapped to rot inside the central base. She knows his kind because she used to _be_ his kind, and it’s just too fucking bad for him that she has no sympathy at all. 

“I’ll stay,” he says hurriedly. He looks to Sasuke. Sasuke’s stare is apathetic. “I’ll – right here. No problem. I’ll stay here.”

“That’s what I thought,” says Karin. She’s been glaring him down, her hand settled in her waist; she looks away, satisfied. “Stay out of my way. And as for _you_ –” but Sasuke nods, briefly, and follows after her without question, out into the echoing, shadowy depths of her prison. 

 

+++

 

Sasuke leaves before the sunset. Or – technically, they both leave before the sunset, but Sasuke is nearly Karin’s own age, stunningly attractive and incredibly powerful, and draped not-quite-tastefully in the alluring folds of a uniform picked out for his use by Lord Orochimaru himself, while Karin wrote off the irrelevant Sound-nin as unworthy of her attention the moment she first felt the sluggishly weak pulse of his chakra: which was sometime early yesterday afternoon, when Sasuke sparked into her attention from halfway across the continent and she became aware of the infinitely duller signal travelling so undeservedly at his side. 

So – Sasuke leaves before the sunset, and Karin sees him off from the north gate. He’s a small figure setting out across the vast, open waters; he doesn’t look back, and she doesn’t watch him go. 

It’s not like she needs to watch. His chakra’s a glow at the back of her mind for the rest of the evening, far-off but clear. The signal begins to fade while she’s working through the day’s visitor reports, the quick scratch of pen on paper, lamplight pooling on her desk. It’s still bright enough to feel when she finally shoves the paperwork into its drawer, and once the locks on her bedroom door are activated she presses together the seal for her sensor’s jutsu: clarified and amplified, Sasuke is once again the brightest star in a chakra constellation that stretches out across the continent, caught up in rapid travelling motion. 

By morning, he’s a cool, distant spark on the very far fringes of her range. Karin has several hours’ worth of company to reconstruct into several months of fantasy – but the klaxon is wailing, the inmates are stirring – and more importantly than that, she has a prison to run. 

She kicks the door of her room shut behind her and sets out for morning inspection.

**Author's Note:**

> [Any comments would be appreciated! ♥ And if you ever feel like talking about Karin and/or Karin-related subjects, I'm [over here on tumblr](http://www.uzumakiwonderland.tumblr.com/), where I talk about just about nothing else, ever.]


End file.
